eBay® PowerSeller Business Practices FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 40. Getting Transaction History from PayPal

In This Practice

• Understanding the downloadable reports

• Choosing report options

• Performing the download

Downloading reports from PayPal can save your bacon. After you run a business for a while, you lose some of your "gung-ho." You know what you're supposed to do on a daily basis, but somehow other responsibilities (or maybe even opportunities for fun) get in the way. It's normal. It's what happens. But by downloading reports from PayPal (and backing them up to an external hard drive), you are archiving the actual data that you should have now and will need in the future.

I've been running a home-based business for close to 20 years. Because I came from a corporate background working in the newspaper business, I've always known that recordkeeping is important. Even so, recordkeeping has always been an ongoing bane of my existence. When I began my home-based business, one of my first tasks was to hire a lawyer and a CPA to teach me what I had to do to satisfy the paperwork gods. But even now that I "know" what to do, doing it often falls by the wayside.

Recordkeeping means keeping track of everything: every penny, sou, farthing, or ruble that you spend or take in. Here in the United States (and in most other countries), we have a little thing called taxes. We all have to turn in tax returns of several sorts when we run a business — and they'd better be correct. There may come a day in the near (or hopefully, far) future when we, as online ...